My Advice To New Software Developers

Basedon my 15 years of software development experience, striving to continuously improve and looking back at what I could have done better I wrote the following advice for new and junior software developers on Quora:

Don’t say I am a Java or .NET developer and restrict yourself to only those platforms

Don’t stay in the same company for too long, some times you settle for 1 year of experience repeated 5 times rather than 5 years of real experience. You can always come back to a company if you like it better than the next one. In large companies you can move to a different group.

Don’t move too fast, take the time to learn from the smart people around you. If you are the smartest person there leave immediately.

Keep learning new and perspective changing technologies and not learn more of the same. For instance:

If you know a object oriented language (C++) learn functional language like Haskell

If you know a statically typed language (Java) learn a dynamically typed language like Ruby

Keep an eye on the trending technologies and briefly explore them to get a taste of them